Editing Remembering Zimbabwe's great alien invasion (section)

== Original interviews ==

Snippets of Mack’s interviews with the children can still be found on YouTube today. A fifth-grader called Francis tells the gentle-eyed psychiatrist he was warned “about something that’s going to happen,” and that “pollution mustn’t be”. Eleven-year-old Emma says; “I think they want people to know that we’re actually making harm on this world and we mustn’t get too technologed [sic].”

I cued up one of the clips on my phone for Sarah, but she waved it away.

“I can’t, I can’t … no, I’ve had too much of my own experience to want to relive somebody else’s.”

After a long draw on her beer she said: “They weren’t wrong, though, about the environmental shit, were they? If you go out there now you’ll see the Miombo forests have disappeared for firewood.”



Drawings by pupils at Ariel School in Zimbabwe of the aliens’ visit to their school in September 1994.

But during my first visit to the district, what had struck me was not the state of the forests but the fact that Ariel School had continued to grow in pupil numbers, and looked to be prospering.

The khaki uniforms, the red floppy hats, the break-time chirring – it all matched the YouTube clips, only there were no longer any white students, the white farming families having all moved elsewhere as a result of the government’s radical land reform policies. The “rough area” beyond the playground had been stumped and mown into a second sports field, dusty for want of rain. I asked a few teachers I bumped into about the events of 1994, but it seemed that aspect of the school’s history had left with the farmers.

“There was his documentary being made about it at one point,” said Sarah, getting a little shaky on her stool. “An American chap. What was his name now … Randall, Randy. Ha! Anyway, that was about seven or eight years ago now, and I haven’t heard anything since.”